Big K root beer, the house brand at Ralphs, did surprisingly well in a root beer taste test. COURTESY KIRK KENNEY

Thirty-two years ago, a couple of guys at San Diego State decided to lay off the hard stuff for a few hours and explore their mutual love of root beer. The college boys prowled liquor stores and vending machines to assemble as many varieties as possible of this greatest of American beverages.

They conducted a taste test and one of the boys wrote a column about it for the school newspaper. Last weekend, the two boys reprised their 1981 test. In one way, they learned, root beer has radically changed since 1981. In another respect, it really hadn’t changed at all. The first boy decided to write another column.

When Kirk Kenney and I did our first test there weren’t many root beer brands to choose from – at least not in America’s eighth-largest city. Our No. 1 was Mug which, believe it or not, was hard to find then. It wasn’t until it was bought by Pepsi five years later that Mug went national.

But when Kirk called me a few weeks ago about the root beer party he and his wife, Leanne, were throwing Labor Day Weekend, I told him I would have no problem finding some seriously good and diverse product.

At Zlaket’s Market in Garden Grove, Dave Zlaket pulled two of his favorite high-end root beers for me: Sparky’s and Saranac. At the Old Towne Grinder in Orange, Mike King recommended Gale’s and a couple of others. Both delis are supplied by an L.A. distributor, Real Soda, which specializes in glass-bottled pop acquired from mostly small-batch regional manufacturers.

In 1981, we scrambled to find diversity; today the hard part was deciding which brands not to taste. Root beer has exploded in popularity. Root Beer World lists 2,605 root beers. We ended up buying 17, originating from Hawaii to England, but to make our test manageable, we narrowed it to 12 for our 14 judges.

The most expensive was Virgil’s at $7 for a 16-ounce bottle. The cheapest was Big K, the Ralphs generic that cost 69 cents for a two-liter bottle. The strangest was “Judge Wapner Root Beer,” created by a relative of the former TV judge. We also put in a couple of popular mass-produced brands – Mug and A&W – to see how they’d fare against the expensive, handcrafted brews.

It was a blind test. Kirk poured the flights into clear shot glasses out of sight of the tasters before Leanne and I handed them out. We asked the eight women and six men rate each root beer on a 1-10 scale. The four highest scoring brews we put in a final flight and had them retaste to crown a winner.

Kirk added up the scores. He looked at me and said: “You are not going to believe it.” The No. 1 rated brew, with an average score of 8.0, was the generic: Big K. The “K” stands for Kroger, the giant grocery concern that, as one root beer reviewer noted derisively, sells “everything from sodas to baby wipes” under its brand.

Those who liked Big K complimented its vanilla finish. One judge, Anne Newbury, wrote on her score sheet that Big K was the “most familiar” tasting. Indeed, the tasters – who were root beer drinkers but not gourmands – pretty consistently went for what they think root beer should taste like. The next-highest rated were A&W and Mug. A craft root beer, Berghoff, finished fourth.

The worst-rated? The 44-cents-per-ounce Virgil’s, with an average rating of 2.8. A heavy licorice influence turned off several. Similarly, Gale’s was knocked by what one judge called its “overpowering cinnamon” flavor. Dad’s was found to be too medicinal. Judge Wapner’s had too much honey taste for most, although Daniel Jacinto, an Iraq war vet who suffered 13 battle wounds, loved it and said it “gave me goose bumps.” Somebody send him a case.

I learned that even for root beer lovers, 16 samples of one to two ounces each can be a lot when you don’t offer a spit bucket. “I’m beginning to think I don’t like root beer,” wrote Leanne’s mom, Gay Howard, after her 11th pour. I really thought Kirk and I were going to have to force the last flight down the old girl.

At the end of the night, we had a lot of expensive root beer left over and I’d learned a lesson: like good hard stuff, good soft stuff must be an acquired taste. We said our goodnights and promised everyone we’d do it again in 32 years. I don’t think that was long enough for Mrs. Howard.

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